While there were plenty of shiny new PS4 games to play in the Sony area, there was only one RPG in evidence on Friday: deep down (without caps, because Japanese devs can be funny that way). Getting to the game was a miniature descent into madness, as the lines to get coupons for gaming time formed a solid mass of humanity. The line to actually play the game was much shorter by comparison.

At its most basic, deep down appears to be an action dungeon-crawling roguelike sort of game. The player is thrust into a generic dungeon to fight ugly bugbear-things for no clear reason. Movement is slow unless one holds the L1 button, and I found out far too late that the L2 targeting button is necessary if I wanted to hit the broad side of a barn, much less a bugbear, with my big honkin' spear. While the graphics were impressive, the demo definitely was not. It felt clunky and slow, with dull enemies and simplistic dungeons. Nothing was really interesting or innovative here, and my lack of skill in this style of gameplay just prolonged the agony.

Nothing was given about the story, but some odd things cropped up during the demo. At random times I could hear a boy's voice crying "Father? Where are you?" and similar things. The weirdest part was when I was near death (on two occasions), and the walls of the dungeon began to fade away. Suddenly I was seeing a ghostly vista behind the "reality" of the dungeon, one that looked a lot more futuristic.

Something weird's going on here, and I have no idea what. There's much more to deep down than the demo shows, that's for certain. It's too bad I have no interest in digging deeper.

(As I typed this up, I googled the game and found a lot of cooler images and video for it. Why none of that was included in the demo is beyond me.)